We Will No Longer Be Actively Supporting Kuzudb
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The developers of KuzuDB announced that they will no longer actively support the project, sparking a discussion about the project's potential alternatives and the implications of abandoning a promising open-source database.
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This holds true for 95% of cases of well-made software.
[1] https://vldb.org/cidrdb/papers/2023/p66-wolde.pdf [2] https://duckpgq.org/
1. https://github.com/oxigraph/oxigraph
[0] https://github.com/cozodb/cozo
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20250318034702/https://blog.kuzu...
So it is correct to say sheep ≠ lamb, or at least sheep !== lamb.
https://kuzudb.com/docs/developer-guide/database-internal/
More on this here:
https://adsharma.github.io/beating-the-CAP-theorem-for-graph...
> [CAP theorem] states that any distributed storage system can provide only two of these three guarantees: Consistency, Availability and Partition safety.
> In the realm of graph databases, we observe a similar “two out three” situation. You can either have scalable systems that are not fully open source or you can have open source systems designed for small graphs. Details below.
(the article follows)
> This is one solution to the CAP theorem for graphs. We can store a billion scale graph using this method in parquet files and use a free, cheap and open source solution to traverse them, perform joins without storage costs that are prohibitively high.
The real question being raised in the blog post is - should the next generation graph databases pursue a local-only embedded strategy or build on top of object storage like many non-graph and vector embedded databases are doing.
Specifically, DuckLake (using system catalog for metadata instead of JSON/YAML) is interesting. I became aware of Apache GraphAr (incubating) after writing the blog post. But it seems to be designed for data interchange between graph databases instead of designing for primary storage.
I still don't quite get the analogy. What are the 2 out of 3 that you can have? The second paragraph I quoted gives a classic 1 out of 2 dilemma - either scalable _or_ open-source.
With the proposed solution, you'll be able to query larger graphs on an open source graph native engine. Thus beating the "CAP theorem for graphs".
https://github.com/LadybugDB/ladybug/pull/3
Last few releases, you couldn't open a file written by a previous version of kuzu. You had to constantly export/import as new versions were released.
This is no longer a problem for kuzu because development has stopped. But any open source fork needs to think about how to stabilize storage.
In the past few releases kuzu switched from database as a directory to a single file database.
This is why I stick to SQLite or PostgreSQL when it comes to databases. An LLM can trivially write me the commonly necessary graph queries if I should need them.
Python dropped or changed a lot of things between Python 2 and Python 3, creating a lot of rework for a lot of users. Are they not to be trusted as a project? Is every project obligated to support every feature they ever released, forever, to be considered trustworthy?
To quote from the MIT license: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND
If the rest of us criticized people making open source like you do, there wouldn’t be any.
Disparaging them and suggesting people should not trust them in the future for not providing ongoing maintenance, when that was never part of the OSS deal, shows a misunderstanding of what OSS is. Pay them for a maintenance contract, or don't expect maintenance. Stop complaining they didn't fulfill some social contract that existed only in your head.
It merely is one of several predictors of whether something is sufficiently reliable for use. In the case of Kuzu, its authors have demonstrated that they're not to be trusted.
My _hope_ is that it was some IP issue with the University of Waterloo and a new company will appear shortly and pretty much pick up where they left off, but that's probably just wishful thinking on my part.
Their message reads, "Kuzu is working on something new! We will no longer be actively supporting KuzuDB. You can access the full archive of KuzuDB here: GitHub" https://github.com/kuzudb/kuzu
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Rough news on kuzu being archived - startups are hard and Semih + Prashanth did so much in ways I value!
For those left in the lurch for compute-tier Apache Arrow-native graph queries for modern OSS ecosystems, GFQL [1] should be pretty fascinating, and hopefully less stress due to a sustainable governance model. Likewise, as an oss deeptech community, we add interesting new bits like the optional record-breaking GPU mode with NVIDIA Rapids [4].
GFQL, the graph dataframe-native query language, is increasingly how Graphistry, Inc. and our community work with graphs at the compute tier. Whether the data comes from a tabular ETL pipeline, a file, SQL, nosql, or a graph storage DB, GFQL makes it easy to do on-the-fly graph transforms and queries at the compute tier at sub-second speeds for graphs anywhere from 100 edges to 1,000,000,000 [3]. Currently, we support arrow/pandas, and arrow / nvidia rapids as the main engine modes.
While we're not marketing it much yet, GFQL is already used daily by every single Graphistry user behind-the-scenes, and directly by analysts & developers at banks, startups, etc around the world. We built it because we needed an OSS compute-tier graph solution for working with modern data systems that separate storage from compute. Likewise, data is a team sport, so it is used by folks on teams who have to rapidly wrangle graphs, whether for analysis, data science, ETL, visualization, or AI. Imagine an ETL pipeline or notebook flow or web app where data comes from files, elastic search, databricks, and neo4j, and you need to do more on-the-fly graph stuff with it.
We started [4] building what became GFQL before Kuzu because it solves real architectural & graph productivity problems that have been challenging our team, our users, and the broader graph community for years now. Likewise, by going dataframe-native & GPU-mode from day 1, it's now a large part of how we approach GPU graph deep tech investments throughout our stack, and means it's a sustainably funded system. We are looking at bigger R&D and commercial support contracts with organizations needing to do subsecond billion+-scale with us so we can build even more, faster (hit me up if that's you!), but overall, most of our users are just like ourselves, and the day-to-day is wanting an easy OSS way to wrangle graphs in our apps & notebooks. As we continue to smooth it out (ex: we'll be adding a familiar Cypher syntax), we'll be writing about it a lot more.
Links:
* ReadTheDocs: SQL <> Cypher <> GFQL - https://pygraphistry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gfql/translate...
* pip install: https://pypi.org/project/graphistry/
* 2025 keynote - OSS interactive billion-edge GFQL analytics on 1 gpu: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/graphistry_at-graph-the-plane...
* 2022 blogpost w/ Ben Lorica first painting the vision: https://thedataexchange.media/the-graph-intelligence-stack/
Hopefully they will ship cool new things.